


Post-Game Wrapup

by coldhope



Series: discstuck drabbles [4]
Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett, Homestuck
Genre: M/M, discstuck crossover drabbles, fuckin wormholes, in which equius is wordy, more stuck than disc
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-26
Updated: 2012-03-26
Packaged: 2017-11-02 13:38:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/369557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coldhope/pseuds/coldhope
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“For some reason I can very easily picture Vantas and an animate natomy talking amongst themselves. Possibly even about harvesting implements.” You sigh and give her a hug before setting her gently on her feet. “I have to see Eridan, kitten. Will you let Vantas know I want a word with him in the morning?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Post-Game Wrapup

**Author's Note:**

> This is much more stuck than disc and focuses largely on Equius/Eridan fluff, but there is Wow-Wow Sauce, skeletons in dresses, and casual football-talent-scouting going on in the background.

You had meant to come straight back from the drinking establishment (my, but that Detritus had quite a tolerance for whatever astonishing organic compounds he’d been imbibing) and find Eridan, but on the way in you’d encountered what appeared to be a team of humans engaged in some form of organized sport and stopped to watch. The object of their exercise was apparently a ball propelled either by bouncing off the head of a player or being kicked as hard as possible, complete with a great deal of shouting. 

Fascinating, but certainly inefficient. By the time they broke up to repair for the morning--no, evening, Equius, get it right, this lot of people live the wrong side of the sunlight-- _evening_ meal, you had worked out a variety of more effective strategies for getting the ball up or down the field and avoiding the individuals set out to provide a defense against the target area. Perhaps you will share your intuition with whoever is responsible, if the opportunity arises. It will no doubt be of great use to them.

When you get into the main building there’s an air of excitement which you judge to be in excess of the normal level associated with this environment and you catch somebody’s arm _very carefully_ \--and apologize--and ask them politely what is going on.

“They did the Rite! And _he_ came through and everything! He was right there chatting away to one of you weir....I mean, ah, one of our honorable visitors,” says your captive, wearing the livery you associate with University servitors. “And eating sausages onna stick like it wasn’t nothing. I heard where he even told them how to reopen some kind of hole in reality!”

“Who is ‘he’?” you inquire.

“Death, of course! --Scuse me, I really need to get this to the high table before it explodes,” he says, and you let go of his arm and watch him scuttle away cradling his bowl of chipped ice with a small glass bottle nestled in the center. 

Not the Handmaid. The Handmaid could never--you shiver--be mistaken for a male. And you don’t know of any Rite that can be used to summon her, even if you were mad enough to want to do so. You shake your head and follow the crowd of people moving toward the Great Hall, and scan the throng for anybody you know.

“Equius!” 

Your moirail wriggles through the crush of humans and flings herself at you with the charming if somewhat societally inappropriate enthusiasm that characterizes her, and you catch her as she wraps around you and holds on tight. “--What is it?” you ask. “Is something wrong? I heard there was some sort of...ceremony performed--”

“They did something _weird!_ With magic! There was this circle and they were all chanting and then a skeleton in a black dress apurred and TALKED LIKE THIS and, um. Eridan kind of fainted.”

“A skeleton in a black dress,” you repeat, skeptically, and then catch up. “What? Where is he?”

She clings to you. “They just took him to his room, I think. Fefurry was there fur awhile but I think she came down fur dinner. And Equius...Karkitty had this looooooong confursation with the skeleton. They were talking apawt sickles and stuff.”

“For some reason I can very easily picture Vantas and an animate natomy talking amongst themselves. Possibly even about harvesting implements.” You sigh and give her a hug before setting her gently on her feet. “I have to see Eridan, kitten. Will you let Vantas know I want a word with him in the morning?”

“Of course. Tell him I hope he feels better?”

You nod, and she skips away to find her (bizarre, non-hemocompliant, nubby-horned) matesprit. Whom you can in fact see holding conversation with skeletons; he talks to Captor all the time and Captor is barely more than bones himself. Still, you wish you’d been there to see it for yourself, and to take care of Eridan.

You know your way around the University by now, or at least those bits of it where you and your associates have been allowed to go, and you make your way quickly up to the corridor where you’ve been quartered until they can work out what the heck to do with you. His door is ever-so-slightly open: you knock softly.

“Go away,” says a sepulchral voice from within.

“It’s me.”

“ _Don’t_ go away, for fuck’s sake, get your ass in here, Eq.”

He’s lying propped up on the weird human sleep-platform thing, looking pallid and unhappy, and your chest hurts very badly for a moment. “Are you all right? I’m so sorry I was late getting back, I stopped to watch a game of some sort, Nepeta only just told me what happened.” You settle on the edge of the sleep-platform and he sits up enough to thunk his forehead on your shoulder.

“Fuckin’ embarrassin’ is what it is. Keeled right over just like a girl in front a everybody, but, Eq, if you’d fuckin _seen_ that, it was...the way he _talked_ , it was right inside your head, not like you were listening to someone say shit out loud. And he said...uh. He said we gribbled reality.”

You nudge him enough to be able to brush your lips over his forehead. No, he’s not feverish. “We did what?”

He tugs on a lock of your hair. “Stop that, I’m not sick, I’m just...fuckin discombobulated is all. We royal seadwellers are all kinds a high-strung, you know. Okay, so Ara was all like ‘space-time got tied up in this great big fuckin knot and so shit happened that made us flip off the handle into your universe,’ and he went ‘well fuck why’d you call me you already got all the answers’ and she was like ‘no these fuckers in the dresses ain’t listenin for shit, how’d we get back’ and then he said stuff about...fuck, I cannot remember, Eq, somethin about thaumic signatures and timestreams, and that we left a hole behind when we came through.”

“A hole in what, exactly?” You’re trying to picture what you know of quantum physics and the nature of temporospatial travel, which you haven’t thought about in ages and ages now, you went through that phase when you were quite small. 

“In reality.” Eridan flops back against the pillows and laces his hands behind his head. He looks a little better than he’d done when you came in. “There’s...fuck, I was _not_ expectin to hear a phantasmagorical manifestation a white science come out with this but there’s this annoyin little creature that eats holes in ship hulls, you gotta treat the wood to protect against them, and as they’re burrowin around in your ship they leave a tunnel behind ‘em, and that’s...what Death said we did.”

You reach out to relocate a tendril of purple hair that is attempting to escape his coif (they do have hair product here, if you know who to ask, apparently) and attempt to crossmatch this to something, anything, you’re familiar with.

“...wait, wormholes?”

“Yeah. Fuckin wormholes, Eq. This is crazy. But it’s the kind a crazy that you can _study_.”

“Well, that _somebody_ can study,” but you’re already thinking ahead, you want to talk to Captor and Aradia in the morning and get that bespectacled wizard, whatsisname, Stibbons, involved as well. The idea of being able to get back home sooner rather than later is a very powerful motivational aid.

He’s looking up at you with a lazy smile, apparently over his attack of royal sea-dweller’s nerves. “Hey. I didn’t get a chance to ask you.”

“Hmm? Ask me what?”

“Was shootin’ that crossbow as good as it looked? Cause it looked pretty _damn_ fine from where I was standin’.”

You can feel the blue flush rise in your cheeks--he still _does_ that to you at every opportunity, especially when it has great social embarrassment potential--and look down at your hands. “It was, ah. It was most salutary.”

Eridan laughs and grabs your hands and tugs you down to lie beside him, and wriggles insistently into your arms. “Keep me warm, these idiots have no idea a climate control, it’s a fuckin disgrace. And I would a said it was more like _transcendent_ or maybe _orgasmic_ than salutary, myself, based on your expression.”

“ _Eridan_.” Your face must be bright blue. He cups a cool hand to your cheek, careless of the dampness. “All _right_ , all right, it was amazing. It...I’ve never dreamed of anything so powerful and yet so simple in design. I want one.”

“You would be unstoppable, babe,” he says into your shoulder, sounding very pleased with himself. “First thing when we get back is build you a fuckin siege crossbow. You can go around shootin’ holes in people’s hives with that shit. It will be _epic_.”

“I can’t just run about causing property damage all willy-nilly,” you protest, but he’s already laughing, and after a moment so are you, and it’s all right that you’re stuck here, it’s all right, because you’re stuck here _with him_.

~

Elsewhere, Mr. Nutt is wondering who that enormous grey chap with the mismatched headgear was, and if perhaps he might be interested in trying out for the Academicals. They could use someone built like that as a goalie, in lieu of building an actual brick convenience in front of the net.


End file.
